The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century England

The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century England Cindy McCreery Clarendon Press, 50 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0 19 926/56 1

Women naturally featured very strongly in the numerous satirical prints issued in late-eighteenth-century London. Although there has in recent years been an increased interest in satires, there has hitherto been no specialised study of this topic. Although the scope of this book is by no means as wide as her title suggests, Cindy McCreery has now filled the gap with a very competent piece of work, based on her Oxford doctoral thesis, supervised by Paul Langford.

Dr McCreery begins her study with Rowlandson's outrageous etching of the Duchess of Devonshire suckling a fox, while ignoring her own hungry infant. This was one of the many prints attacking the Duchess's active support of Charles James Fox in the Westminster election of 1784. As the author argues, it was when women, whether fine ladies or simple girls from the country, strayed from their expected roles that they laid themselves open to attack by the satirists. The author's initial work in this field was a study of the Tete-a-tete heads in the scurrilous Town and Country magazine; this magazine sold well, particularly in the provinces, on the strength of small paired portraits of the latest adulterous or eloping couple to be talked about in London. Most satires were, however, not in periodicals, of whose circulation and readership we can have an approximate idea, but were singly issued.

The initial chapter places the satirical print in the context of the London art market and raises the crucial question of how widely the prints were known. The author cites the interesting article in the January 1992 issue of History by Eirwen Nicholson in which it is argued that the audience for singly issued satires was smaller than many historians now maintain. Here we have to draw a distinction, not only between satirical and humorous prints, which being less dependent on current affairs often had a longer life and wider circulation, but between the outputs of different publishers. Thus the line-engraved 'social' satires issued by Matthew Darly, who for many years had a shop, with his wife, Mary (herself a printmaker), in the Strand, had a wide circulation. In contrast, as I have argued elsewhere, the business strategy of a publisher such as William Holland was to produce a large number of different prints for sale in relatively small numbers. Some of these, such as English Slavery (1788), illustrated here, were very large and expensive, and consequently hardly known outside a group of rich collectors. Reproduction of images in a book of today would appear to give them equal importance, yet whereas Hogarth's prints were part of the general visual culture of the day, others created by less recognized talents, such as William Dent (one of whose prints, The male carriage, 1787, is discussed here without his name being linked to the print), may have been seen by only a handful of people since they were created.

The author devotes separate chapters to the different situations in which transgression from the expected norm was most likely to take place. After discussing representations of prostitutes, one of the subjects most favoured by the satirists, the author looks at women on the stage, and then at those with artistic, literary or political pretensions. The final three chapters deal with 'Aristocratic Adulteresses and Patriotic Wives', 'Fashionable Mammas and Natural Mothers' and 'Old Maids, Merry Widows, and Cosy Wives'. In the last chapter there is rightly much discussion of the widespread attacks on the society ladies who encouraged gambling, notably Mrs Hobart and Lady Archer (who, not being the daughter of a duke or an earl, would have been most embarrassed to have been called 'Lady Sarah Archer', as she is occasionally referred to here). The feeling against these figures was not something whipped up by the print publishers and it is worth pointing out that in May 1796 these women were threatened with the pillory by the judge Lord Kenyon.

Inevitably in dealing with such large topics some of the discussions are far too abbreviated. For example, the disapproval of Mrs Thrale's marriage to the Italian musician Gabriel Piozzi was also on the grounds that she was neglecting her children, as well as the reasons that are given here. The little-known print entitled Signor Pi-z-i ravishing Mrs Thrale, with its explicit suggestions that Piozzi's motives were mercenary and Thrale's lustful, which the author has found in the Pierpont Morgan library, is one of a number of images which do not seem to have been reproduced before. It is possible that it was not a regularly published print, since it seems to lack a publication line; on the other hand it carries a signature, 'SC' or 'SCH'. The print is harmless enough as an image; it is the inscription that brings it to the edge of obscenity. One of the book's omissions is that so little is said here about illicit prints, that is those which were either obscene or pornographic. These were intended for male eyes, and the trade was strictly under the counter. Although the naughty prints produced by Rowlandson--his women have such charm that one hesitates to call them obscene--are famous, little is known about this aspect of the London print market, although a number of such English prints were reproduced a century ago in various books by Edward Fuchs, none of which are mentioned in the author's comprehensive bibliography.

The omission of this kind of print is understandable; more surprising is the author's failure to give so little space to prints ridiculing female fashion. This kind of print is so plentiful that in 1996 there was an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum Twente in Enchede, Netherlands, entirely devoted to them, High Heads: Hair Fashions depicted in Eighteenth-Century Prints published by Matthew and Mary Darly. This had an excellent sixty-page catalogue by Harriet Stroomberg, of which Dr McCreery seems unaware. More recently, in 2002, Professor Diana Donald (whose The Age of Caricature: Satirical prints in the Reign of George III, 1996, remains the best modern survey), organised a travelling exhibition of Georgian satires of dress for the South Bank Centre, under the title Followers of fashion, with an illustrated catalogue.

David Alexander is the author of Richard Newton and English Caricature in the 1790s (Manchester University Press, 1998).

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